Critical studies

  Ambiguity talk  

After our talk on ambiguity and art we've been asked to find two examples of work in relation to ambiguity and discus.  For this piece ill be looking the Rabbit films by David Lynch. 

David Lynch is an American artist spanning a range of mediums, but ill be looking at his film and video work. Rabbits is a series of 9 short web films that come together to make a larger film. These are surrealist films, showing a humanoid rabbit family in there living room, Its shown like a traditional nuclear family type in an old-school sitcom like way but has strange themes of  both horror and humour simultaneously. All the way through there's ominous tense music/sound in the background, lighting that focuses on casting shadow and strange applause at times that sounds almost like a live audience, this just adds to that mismatched feel of horror meeting strange comedy. There is a dialogue to this film but it all comes out in disordered lines of speech, all the speech feels related but its as if each rabbit person is at completely different points in the conversation, all out of sink with one another, like the script has been written then reordered. The whole film takes place in the living room scene almost mechanically but at points strange this happen within there, a demonic like voice and red light appear, strange solo pieces almost like macabre poetry readings and a strange burning hole in the wall.

 From the information I was able to find I believe these short films were about reimagining the 80s sitcom and exploring the idea of showing humour without things actually being humorous. To me i find this piece to be quite ambiguous, once id read the intention behind it, it was easy to see it was exploring this idea of portraying humour and old sitcoms but even with this there are still large aspects that remain cryptic and odd. The whole film evokes an uncanny and uneasy feeling, the jumbled speech and strange things like the solo readings or the red lights add to this obscure feeling of not really knowing what's going on but feeling compelled to keep watching anyway, to see if it will make sense; Again using intrigue to capture the viewer but this time by almost confusing them.